An abductive event calculus planner

In 1969 Cordell presented his seminal description of planning as theorem proving with the situation calculus. The most pleasing feature of Green's account was the negligible gap between high-level logical specification and practical implementation. This paper attempts to reinstate the ideal of planning via theorem proving in a modern guise. In particular, the paper shows that if we adopt the event calculus as our logical formalism and employ abductive logic programming as our theorem proving technique, then the computation performed mirrors closely that of a hand-coded partial-order planning algorithm. Soundness and completeness results for this logic programming implementation are given. Finally the paper shows that, if we extend the event calculus in a natural way to accommodate compound actions, then using the same abductive theorem proving techniques we can obtain a hierarchical planner.